The companies that win are those that learn the fastest

Content volume: what can news learn from Apple and Amazon

The most popular news sites (MailOnline and The Guardian) produce masses of content. It’s good for SEO.

Is there anything we can learn from outside the world of news?

Platforms

The masters of the platform approach are iTunes and Amazon. They curate a few key areas, such as the home page, and they make clever use of algorithms to manage the rest.

The clever thing is that anyone can publish content but only the best content gets surfaced. Even the least popular content contributes some traffic. This “long tail” can even outweigh the superstar content.

Community

Stack Overflow are the masters of community. It’s a forum with millions of users. Reputation points can be earned by asking valuable questions and posting answers. Users with a high enough reputation can moderate and help manage the forums.

Moderation focuses on guiding users on how to add value (rather than just blacklisting users).

It’s a great way to distribute the onerous task of managing the content.